Purdue University

Department of Physics
Condensed Matter Seminar

Evidence for Half-Integer Fluxoid States in Mesoscopic Rings of Sr2RuO4

Friday February 04, 2011

Refreshments are served at 3:00 p.m. in Physics room 242.

Raffi Budakian

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

http://physics.illinois.edu/people/profile.asp?budakian

In the past decade, there has emerged strong evidence to support spin-triplet superconductivity in the layered-perovskite Sr2RuO4 (SRO), whose ground state is thought to be analogous to the A-phase of superfluid 3He. It is believed that the spin and orbital degrees of freedom of the su­perconducting order parameter can give rise to states with remarkable properties, such as chiral domains, and half-quantum vortices (HQV) that may obey non-Abelian statistics. With regards to the latter, recent theoretical work suggests that the HQV state could be made energetically fa­vorable in mesoscopic SRO samples. In this talk, I will present a new method for ultrasensitive cantilever magnetometry that allows us to probe the magnetic response of mesoscopic samples of SRO. Our most intriguing observation is the appearance of fractional fluxoid states having half the magnetic moment of the full, or integer, fluxoid. In this talk, I will discuss the conditions re­quired to stabilize the half-integer fluxoid states, and also present some ideas as to their origin.